Item – Period gave over twisting my uterus into a pretzel on Sunday night, ooh, over a week ago now. I was pale and tired for a few days afterwards. I took some iron pills. I got violently constipated. Sod the iron pills.

Item – Colleague at work has swine flu. Seriously. The rest of us are all leaping out of our skins and glaring when anyone sneezes. As the office is being dis-and-re-mantled about us by men with drills, and the air is thick with brick-dust, there is much innocent sneezing, and therefore much much needless glaring.

Item – Also, the drill noise? Making me unstable.

Item – I will, I promise, come back and tell you about the acupuncturist I saw on Thursday.

Item – Only, I seem to have left this updating thing a bit late this evening, and H is trying to chivvy me into bed. I probably ought to let myself be chivvied.

Item – Why haven’t I written anything for over a week? The above doesn’t seem to really cover it.

I have spent the past 48 hours alternately a) lying a crumpled heap, weeping with pain and frustration, b) running frantically on the exercise machine in the hope that exercising will, as advertised by every interfering busy-body I ever did meet, help the cramps (results, mixed, inconclusive, especially at 2 am (seriously. Trundling away in the dark at 2 am. A real low-point, that)) c) not eating, because I am too nauseous and in too much pain to face anything requiring more digesting than herbal tea and painkillers d) pressing a viciously hot hot-water-bottle to either lower abdomen or back and e) bleeding excessively. I haven’t slept either. Funny that.

The thing is, I don’t have any of the Big Bad Conditions that are supposed to cause the above. I don’t, for example, have endometriosis. When I had a laparoscopy two years ago, endo was one of the things they were looking for. My insides were, indeed stuck together with great bands of scar tissue from the surgery I had had at eighteen, but that’s a different issue, and anyway, most of them were then removed. I don’t have a fibroid, or adenomyosis either, though I was nearly diagnosed with both, because my uterine cavity looks wonky. Well, it would. I have an arcuate uterus. That means the top of it bulges down rather than up, so it’s vaguely heart-shaped. It’s a relatively harmless congenital defect. I don’t think it’s supposed to make your periods hell on earth. I don’t have polyps anymore, though I did once (removed during above-mentioned lap). There is, basically, nothing in, on, or around the uterus that should cause it to cramp up into a screaming ball of agony and then soak through super plus extra tampons in less than two hours, with bonus thumb-sized clots just in case life wasn’t truly disgusting enough already.

Also, this cycle? Cute Ute and the Ovary and Sidekick of Fruit Madness laugh in the face of feminax ultra. Oh look, a pill. Shall we ignore it? Why yes, bwahahaha. We won’t even tell May we saw it. This has seriously upset me.

Basically, WTF is up with my uterus? What is going on in there?

This is Captain May of the Starship Craptastica, taking her crew of Mysterons back to bed for some more hot-water-bottling and hopefully some fucking sleep already. May the NSAIDs be with you.

I woke up this morning feeling crampy and disgruntled. I went to the loo, and lo, there was blood.

I spent the day at work feeling spaced out on naproxen sodium, still in a bit of pain (which is fucking annoying, by the way, no matter how many times the Positive Thinking Fairy points out that it’s a lot better than being in a lot of pain), vague, distracted, clumsy, spilt tea down my leg, pinched my thumb in the window-frame, fell off the step-ladder while shelving books (caught self on shelves, which swayed and creaked alarmingly, but luckily all the books that fell off fell off on the other side of the stacks), stared at computer screen for hours, no doubt with mouth hanging open and thin trail of drool making its way to the point of the chin. Menstruating is a seriously flawed and unpleasant business. Intelligent design my dimpled arse.

So. On to cycle whatevertheheythisis – hang on, I’ll check – it’s the 20th since I first stopped taking the pill nearly 4 years ago. Keeping in mind that exactly half of those cycles have been ovulatory. Yes. In four years, I have ovulated ten times. And then we wonder why I can’t get pregnant. Well, I did get pregnant, so, you know, once in ten cycles would be normal if I ovulated ten times a freaking year like real human beings do.

H and I are both feeling a tad frustrated today. By tad, of course, I mean ‘astronomically’. Nearly four years, this has taken. And what with ovulations being so few and far between, getting my period is pretty much like getting tipped back into the Abyss. Will we find ovulation island again? Who can say. Is there a bottom or even a side to this abyss? Again, who can say. Carry on doggy-paddling.

So, we got the internet back. Why yes, we lost our broadband; where did you think I’d been? Anyway, I’m here now.

(Oh God, I nearly went mental not having access to the internet. Evenings went ‘oh, I’ll just check my post, wait, no. OK, I’ll check my blogs, arse, no. Twitter then, arse arse, no. Fine, I’ll just go online and see what’s on telly, ARSE, no. I shall have to google that actor I’m sure I’ve seen in something else AAAAAARGH,’ and so on and infinitum. I am such a sad eejit).

Anyway, update on current situation. Today, 12 days post ovulation. Past form would indicate period starts tomorrow. I was so bored what with the lack of internets I whizzed on two separate pee-sticks, both so very negative I am snow-blind from staring at them. Mind playing usual favourite trick of talking me into feeling nauseous every time I think about it too hard. Also, I have spent days being bothered by nasty metallic taste in mouth, which Logic would dictate is caused by extensive building works at work, which fill the air with dust, but Logic is being chased round the locker-room and towel-flicked by Hysteria at the moment. So, two pee-sticks sacrificed the gods of MindFuck.

Having peed on the second (blanketty-blank) stick today, I now feel crampy. Go me.

Why yes, this is absolutely a two week wait. We performed our marital duties most assiduously at exactly the right time and everything.

Naturally, I am using the fact I ovulated merely as a good indicator of which day I will need to have filled the bathroom shelves with sanitary products and feminax ultra by (Friday or Saturday week, thank you for asking).

Eh, no. I am not going to let that bitch Hope in the house again. No no no. She can stay out in the yard and howl at the lighted windows in the drizzle and the dark. Now she knows how I feel.

Meanwhile, in the rest of my life, H, poor lamb, has my horrible cold/possible swine flu. I came home on Friday evening to find him tucked up in bed feeling shivery and pathetic. As I type, he’s huddled in his towelling dressing-gown, laughing very feebly at the comedy on telly, and looking clammy and glassy-eyed. Oh joy. Especially as he is a man, and therefore a rotten patient:

a) He will whimper about how much he aches or his head hurts, and I will recommend two paracetamol and a cup of tea, and I will make him tea and fetch the pills, and he will drink the tea, and he will complain about being achey, and I will say sympathetically ‘oh, isn’t the paracetamol working?’ and he will say ‘I didn’t take the paracetamol,’ and I will stare at him in bewilderment.

b) He will roam incessantly about the flat in nothing but underpants and slippers, answering every query with ‘dunno’. Can I bring you anything? Dunno. Are you hungry? Dunno. Are you thirsty? Dunno. Do you want a cup of tea? Dunno. Shall I cook dinner now? Dunno. I’m going to the shops, can I get you some throat sweets? Dunno. Do you want a sharp kick on the shins? Dunno. Shall we find out the hard way? Dunno. Etc.

c) He has naps in the middle of the day when he’s unwell. I am a royal bitch, aren’t I? Of course the poor ailing lamb should be allowed a nap. Lots of them. But I am envious. I am an insomniac and I can’t nap unless I have a migraine (in which case I think it’s technically passing out, not napping). Envy envy envy. Also, I can’t do a bloody thing when H is asleep, I can’t watch tv or listen to the radio or otherwise crash about; well, I could, but then I’d wake him up, and like I said, the poor lamb should be allowed a nap. I retire to the kitchen and read a book in conflicted and resentful silence. The stupid thing is, I like reading, and by the time H wakes up again, I am thoroughly absorbed and wish he’d go back to bed and stop pacing about and opening and closing the fridge behind my head.

But just right now, what is pissing me very much off indeed (can you tell by the swearing?), is the bloody irony, that back in the Autumn I was ovulating solo. Yes, OK, late, and erratically, but I totally was. Start Clomid, stop ovulating. Stay stopped. Stop but totally. Up the Clomid. No doing. Try a third time. Nope. Satsuma pulls all her follicles in and pretends to be dead. Weeks pass. Eight weeks.

Fine, I cry. Bollocks to the Clomid. We shan’t bother any more. I will set fire to the remaining packets with much ceremony in the back yard. Ha ha.

And Satsuma, who is two parts contrariness to three parts laziness, hearing this, yawns, rolls over, and idly pops one out.

Can I stop myself from thinking about how many au-naturale cycles I could have had in the last six months if I hadn’t been battering Satsuma senseless with Clomid? Can I buggery.